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Originally posted by Brenics

Over a decade ago, a team at Blizzard took up accessibility as its mantra and made a game called World of Warcraft. A man named Mark Kern led them through countless UI iterations in search of the easiest and most intuitive interface; he directed them to build huge numbers of quests, ensuring the player never had to worry about where to go next.

Now though, Kern works at Red 5 Studios on a game called Firefall. And he worries he helped Blizzard make a terrible mistake.

“It worked,” he says. “Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost? Sometimes I look at WoW and think ‘what have we done?’ I think I know. I think we killed a genre.”

http://tinyurl.com/mqaccuw

Great read and agree 100% with him.

Comments?

true.

and it continues.

also catering to PvE-only players again and again and again and again and again again and again and again and again and again .

before WoW we had no players online in our games (maybe 200 at nite on a huge world server.... doesnt work)

they made the masses play mmos.

without blizz this genre would be a niche.

what firefall is doing now is trying to get some attention, since they screwed their game and they desperately need people to play it.

Bullshit. They fucked the genre. Many games had plenty of players before WoW, look at both Tibia and Lineage 2. L2 had sieges with 100s of players fighting each other. Tibia had worlds that might not have been huge but ~850 on at night was normal, you had to queue to get online. Also yes they made the masses play the MMOs, that might be great from a business perspective but for the old community there are no games left, if you took someone from back then and put them in our time they would not understand wtf happened. Sure they might enjoy the games for a while but they will be wanting the good old MMOs that aren't around anymore (not really at least).

Compared to how many people play MMOS now the amount of people playing during days of Tibia and Lienag 2 were like drop in an ocean.

I am sorry MMOS wen't mainstream and allowed more people to enjoy gaming. Didn't know MMO genre was suppossed to revolve around players like you for eternity.

Yeah because gaming itself exploded and became very popular. WoW helped exposing the masses to the MMO genre but they aren't the ones that made it so everyone plays games. Also just because something is easily accessible and popular doesn't mean it's good. Look at McDonalds.

By the way, never said they should have it revolving around me and those of mine, but having something at all to play for the older generation of gamers who liked the genre before it became all silver platter crap would be appreciated.

I was talking only about MMO genre and yes Blizzard even though in beginning made the Warcraft MMO only to attract Warfract strategy fans, they had no idea that they will end up being so big and popular and change MMO landscape for ever.

Things like this are not planned it just happens. And please don't even start with Mcdonalds analogy. Mc donalds is popular because it is cheap. So this analogy never fits with MMOS which require hell lot of money investment than cheap Mcdonals menu.

Andto answer your last paragraph. There are plenty of MMOS which appeal to older generation who want something old school problem is that people spend more time bashing WOW than actually playing those games.

"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'-Jesse Schell

"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."-Luke McKinney

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Originally posted by BillMurphy

I'm just going to post in here and facepalm a little bit... why would you link to an outside site that links back to an article originally posted by Mark here as its source and one that was all over our front page on Friday?

I read your article the day you put it up and I could not agree more that MMOs have become too easy. I agree that WoW killed a genera because the way they built the game around accessibility. They did start off making things easier at the end of BC which was a very smart move to allow players to see the content that were not top end raiders. This would still allow players to make the game itself a process and spend more than 2 months chewing on a raid instance. Yes WOTLK did do an OK job expanding on this and making the older content easier to clear however what they did do wrong was make it so that there was no point in continuing the old content. So there was no reason to get the gear from Naxx, then Uld, then TOC when IC was out. Just run the new instances and you get geared to move into IC. Accessibility was also done wrong in the sense that the raid did not scale so it was up to the guilds to keep exactly 10 people or 25 people in the raid group just to be able to go. The problem is I started seeing this in WOTLK few and few people could do 3 or 4 night a week, many only could do 2. These are the same people that were raiding 3 to 5 in Vanilla in BC however by WoTLK they had kids and other priorities.

People think of Scaling and Smaller raids as being easier. How hard was Shattered Halls Herioc or Shadow Labs? These are 5 man instances which many players did not clear during BC. They were hard and if you did not have a tight nit group you would not clear these instances. I cleared both with my friends, I never would have pugged them. Back to my point these are smaller groups that the raids were harder. Also during WOTLK how many guilds were selling LK slayer titles? I know of 1 guild on my server would bring 15 people into the 25 man raid and the 15 people would jump off the cliff in the 25 man raid 10 people would kill the LK. In a 10 man if you lost 1 or 2 people you were likely going to wipe. Smaller raid tougher than the 25 man.

First MMOs need to get back to tougher content. Second Tougher content does not mean group size. A 5 man herioc can be much tougher than a 25 man raid. See Shattered Halls Heroic during BC. 3rd its time for games to push to scale their content. Want to do it with 25 people, bring 25 people and it will be harder than with 13 people in the casual guild. Lastly a LFR tool which allows you to ignore all mechanics is pointless just mail the players the gear. WoW LFR is a joke and is why normal raiding guilds are no more as well as because they got too many tiers of 1 raid.

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Originally posted by Brenics

Over a decade ago, a team at Blizzard took up accessibility as its mantra and made a game called World of Warcraft. A man named Mark Kern led them through countless UI iterations in search of the easiest and most intuitive interface; he directed them to build huge numbers of quests, ensuring the player never had to worry about where to go next.

Now though, Kern works at Red 5 Studios on a game called Firefall. And he worries he helped Blizzard make a terrible mistake.

“It worked,” he says. “Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost? Sometimes I look at WoW and think ‘what have we done?’ I think I know. I think we killed a genre.”

http://tinyurl.com/mqaccuw

Great read and agree 100% with him.

Comments?

It is a featured article on this site.....shouldn't these threads be merged?

before WoW we had no players online in our games (maybe 200 at nite on a huge world server.... doesnt work)

they made the masses play mmos.

without blizz this genre would be a niche.

what firefall is doing now is trying to get some attention, since they screwed their game and they desperately need people to play it.

Bullshit. They fucked the genre. Many games had plenty of players before WoW, look at both Tibia and Lineage 2. L2 had sieges with 100s of players fighting each other. Tibia had worlds that might not have been huge but ~850 on at night was normal, you had to queue to get online. Also yes they made the masses play the MMOs, that might be great from a business perspective but for the old community there are no games left, if you took someone from back then and put them in our time they would not understand wtf happened. Sure they might enjoy the games for a while but they will be wanting the good old MMOs that aren't around anymore (not really at least).

Compared to how many people play MMOS now the amount of people playing during days of Tibia and Lienag 2 were like drop in an ocean.

I am sorry MMOS wen't mainstream and allowed more people to enjoy gaming. Didn't know MMO genre was suppossed to revolve around players like you for eternity.

Yeah because gaming itself exploded and became very popular. WoW helped exposing the masses to the MMO genre but they aren't the ones that made it so everyone plays games. Also just because something is easily accessible and popular doesn't mean it's good. Look at McDonalds.

By the way, never said they should have it revolving around me and those of mine, but having something at all to play for the older generation of gamers who liked the genre before it became all silver platter crap would be appreciated.

I was talking only about MMO genre and yes Blizzard even though in beginning made the Warcraft MMO only to attract Warfract strategy fans, they had no idea that they will end up being so big and popular and change MMO landscape for ever.

Things like this are not planned it just happens. And please don't even start with Mcdonalds analogy. Mc donalds is popular because it is cheap. So this analogy never fits with MMOS which require hell lot of money investment than cheap Mcdonals menu.

Andto answer your last paragraph. There are plenty of MMOS which appeal to older generation who want something old school problem is that people spend more time bashing WOW than actually playing those games.

Dude... just what? Games at all are freaking cheap, almost free ffs. a burger is 9USD and a subscription is just a bit more than that.

Also I think WoW was pretty nice back when it released, it was much more grindy than it was these days. Harder to finish and all that, I had no beef with it even though I didn't enjoy it. But at some point they just started making it easier and easier and everyone else followed suit because that is how you persuade investors. "These guys did great, we can make even better just look at this and that!".

And tell me what plenty of games there are, where are those plenty of games? Tell me this.

before WoW we had no players online in our games (maybe 200 at nite on a huge world server.... doesnt work)

they made the masses play mmos.

without blizz this genre would be a niche.

what firefall is doing now is trying to get some attention, since they screwed their game and they desperately need people to play it.

Bullshit. They fucked the genre. Many games had plenty of players before WoW, look at both Tibia and Lineage 2. L2 had sieges with 100s of players fighting each other. Tibia had worlds that might not have been huge but ~850 on at night was normal, you had to queue to get online. Also yes they made the masses play the MMOs, that might be great from a business perspective but for the old community there are no games left, if you took someone from back then and put them in our time they would not understand wtf happened. Sure they might enjoy the games for a while but they will be wanting the good old MMOs that aren't around anymore (not really at least).

Compared to how many people play MMOS now the amount of people playing during days of Tibia and Lienag 2 were like drop in an ocean.

I am sorry MMOS wen't mainstream and allowed more people to enjoy gaming. Didn't know MMO genre was suppossed to revolve around players like you for eternity.

Yeah because gaming itself exploded and became very popular. WoW helped exposing the masses to the MMO genre but they aren't the ones that made it so everyone plays games. Also just because something is easily accessible and popular doesn't mean it's good. Look at McDonalds.

By the way, never said they should have it revolving around me and those of mine, but having something at all to play for the older generation of gamers who liked the genre before it became all silver platter crap would be appreciated.

I was talking only about MMO genre and yes Blizzard even though in beginning made the Warcraft MMO only to attract Warfract strategy fans, they had no idea that they will end up being so big and popular and change MMO landscape for ever.

Things like this are not planned it just happens. And please don't even start with Mcdonalds analogy. Mc donalds is popular because it is cheap. So this analogy never fits with MMOS which require hell lot of money investment than cheap Mcdonals menu.

Andto answer your last paragraph. There are plenty of MMOS which appeal to older generation who want something old school problem is that people spend more time bashing WOW than actually playing those games.

Dude... just what? Games at all are freaking cheap, almost free ffs. a burger is 9USD and a subscription is just a bit more than that.

Also I think WoW was pretty nice back when it released, it was much more grindy than it was these days. Harder to finish and all that, I had no beef with it even though I didn't enjoy it. But at some point they just started making it easier and easier and everyone else followed suit because that is how you persuade investors. "These guys did great, we can make even better just look at this and that!".

And tell me what plenty of games there are, where are those plenty of games? Tell me this.

Well all games are cheap then so why only pick WOW for Mc Donald analogy? you are talking about popularity here and i told you exactly why mc donald is popular because it is very cheap. How does that analogy even work when WOW and Mcdonals both are popular for very different reasons?

Let us see..

Fallen Earth

FFXI

Eve Online

Perpetum Online

Darkfall

Age Of Wushu

Ryzom

Xsyon

Few just top of my head and i didn't have to think too hard i am sure there are more). Hell even old games like EQ, Anarchy Online are still up and running.

Then we have upcoming games like Archage, The Repopulation, World Of Darkness, EQnext and many many more.

Thing is not MMO is good enough for so called old school players. And i am 100% sure even the new upcoming sandbox MMOS won't make them happy.

"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'-Jesse Schell

"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."-Luke McKinney